Body Politics and the Fictional Double

[7] Performing Bodies, Performing Culture: An Interview with Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante

performing bodies, performing culture 105 [7] performing bodies, performing culture: an interview with coco fusco and nao bustamante ROSEMARY WEATHERSTON Nao Bustamante is a performance artist pioneer who has been based in San Francisco’s Mission District for over a decade. Notorious for her edgy improvisational pieces in which both she and her audiences are on display, she describes her artistic method as one of disarming audience members “with a sense of vulnerability and sensuality, only to confront them with a startling wake-up call.” Using her own body “as a source of image, narrative , and emotion,” Bustamante generates performances that “communicate on the level of subconscious language, taking the spectator on a bizarre journey, cracking stereotypes by embodying them.”1 Among her numerous solo works—The Soul Sentence of MisDemeanor (1990), Ice Queen on a Soapbox (1991), The Frigid Bride (1991), Rosa Does Joan (1992), Playball! (1993), The Patriarchy Blues (1993), La Musica Del Corazón (1993), Dangerous Curves (1995), and A Tribute to Those Who Have Eaten Food Before Us (1998)—perhaps her best known pieces are Indig/urrito (1992), in which she offered absolution from the sin of colonial oppression to any white male audience member willing to take a bite of her strap-on vegetarian burrito/dildo; and America, the Beautiful (1995, 1998), in which she used Rosemary Weatherston 106 packing tape to transform herself into an hour-glass-shaped sex kitten, who unsteadily attempted to balance American patriotic and feminine ideals while traversing a ladder in four-inch heels. In addition to her work as a solo performer, Bustamante has collaborated with artists from a wide range of disciplines, such as the experimental dance group Osseus Labyrint in Umphallos Epos (1994), which toured in Taiwan and Hong Kong; on-line artist David Baal in In the Ring with Rosa; and Miguel Calderón in the video project The Chain South (1994–95). She has also been a guest curator at a number of prestigious art institutions, had her writings published in Revista Paralax Journal (1993) and On Our Backs (1995), and begun producing visual art exhibitions, including the site-specific installation Postcolonial Día de la Raza (1997) and the mixedmedia group show When Borders Migrate (1998). Coco Fusco is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work, like Bustamante’s, has met with international success. Taking what she calls an “obsession with culture” and her belief in cultural representation as a key site of political struggle, Fusco creates “media-based art, performance, and other experimental forms that dramatize, in their production and reception, the process of cultures meeting, clashing, and mixing.”2 Between 1989 and 1995 many of her projects were created in collaboration with Mexican artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña and interrogated historic, economic, and cultural relations between North and South Americas. Among their joint works were Norte:Sur (1990), La Chavela Realty Company (1991), 1992: The Year of the White Bear (1992), and Mexarcane International (1994). Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , the performance component of 1992: The Year of the White Bear, in which Fusco and Gómez-Peña toured as a caged indigenous couple from the undiscovered (imaginary) island of Guatinaui in the Gulf of Mexico, was selected for the 1992 Sydney Biennial and the 1993 Whitney Biennial. The awardwinning video documentary of their experiences performing as imaginary Amerindians, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, was directed and produced by Fusco with Paula Heredia in 1994. Fusco’s most recent solo works include Better Yet When Dead (1996–97) a performance installation examining the fetishization of Latin American women artists after their deaths, and Rights of Passage (1997), a site-specific performance installation in Johannesburg, South Africa, about race, space, and power in the postapartheid era. As successful a facilitator and writer as she is an artist, Fusco has curated a number of international exhibitions on subjects ranging from black American short films and videos to Latin American performance art. Her performing bodies, performing culture 107 articles have appeared in such publications as the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Art in America, Frieze, Nka: The Journal of African Art, Afterimage, Screen and Third Text (Britain), and La Jornada and Poliester (Mexico), as well as in several anthologies. Her collection of essays on art, media, and cultural politics titled English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion...